Clearly we cherish our friendships with other women. I was touched by the beautiful tributes to your friends that you wrote last week. Now, let’s talk about what you do to keep your friendships alive? How much time do you spend with friends? What sorts of interests and activities do you share? I think we’ll all get inspiration from reading your comments.
Quote of the Week
A wise woman adapts herself to circumstances as water shapes itself to the vessel that contains it.
~ Chinese Proverb
Join the Conversation
This is a discussion site for women 60 and older. You are invited to help shape the stories in my upcoming book.
I try to post a new question for discussion every Monday and look forward to your comments.
Women & Aging 
Your question brought back memories of friends in years past when they had young children and my children were older. I worked with developmentally disabled children. I would occassionaly keep the children so their parents could take vacations.
I took friends to placeslike Nashville where one auditioned for a record company.
I took friends to to see plays, concerts, etc.
Hopefully these activities, plus others, nourished our friendship.
Those were physical acts that were important at the time. I had to rack my brain to think what I do now to nourish my friends. Finally it came to me that I try to make them laugh and /or feel better after they have talked or been with me.
This thought was an epiphany for me.
I am glad I am getting a chance to talk about my friends again, because I forgot one who should have been at the top of my friend list–my sister! We know that we our each other’s “best friend” and I guess that is why I failed to put her on my “best friend” list. I guess I was taking her for granted. Sister, I shall try never do that again! I prefer to do things with my friends in person rather than gab on the phone or send emails. I have one friend who is still mad at me for moving to Arkansas, but I think she has forgiven me. I call her my “needy” friend and I try to keep in contact with her as much as possible. Aren’t friends great! I think I will go have a glass of wine and give a toast to all my fabulous friends!
Nourishing Friendships
I look forward to participating with you on this discussion site. As a 70 year old married, mother and grandmother I have enjoyed reviewing your current Nurishing friendships discussion and I will start with this topic and move backward and address earlier topics.
As others have commented, not all our valued friendships have been
of long duration.
Each friendship is appreciated and nourished differently.
I have only 3 intimate long time relationships with other women that have withstood the test of time. My longest intimate friend is my sister in law, Helene. I met her in college when I was 18 and we bagan a friendship which has lasted for over 50 years. I married her brother. My next two intimate friends are my two daughters. My oldest daughter will turn 50
in September and her younger sister is 43 years old.
During my life, I have had friends that I felt close to for a time and
I thought our friendship would last for years. I value these relationships but
I guess we moved on and now only maintain our friendship on a limited basis.
I am pleased and surprised that I have 3 strong women who are long term valued friends. Because of the phone and internet, we communicate multiple times a week.
Our shared interests include our family, volunteer activities, politics,
health, cooking, books that we like or don’t like, news, current interests etc. We discuss concerns and problems but don’t give a lot of advice.
I now live in a retirement community and I have valued friends
that I have only known for less than 10 years. Again, I value their friendship and I spend time on a daily or weekly basis with them. Most of these new friends share interest in family, the community, volunteer activities, books, movies, walking together and being available to help
each other when we face a health crisis or a death in our family.
Frequent contact seems to be important for me to keep a friendship vibrant.
It seems that we all value friendships that go way back when. Relationships that have grown over time, and that have withstood the test of time. I would like to praise friendships of the here and now, those that are made in, say, retirement communities where people move in from all over to live side by side for what can only be a few years. Shared pasts are nonexistent. It is shared presents that count.
And count, they do. I can’t explain it, but I can say this: I’m in a small music group. Between songs, we chit chat. Remember Hee Haw, how Grandpa and Lulu and the rest would play a little, then would come some nonsensical patter? That’s how it is with us. And very quickly, boom!, we’re friends.
I have not been here long enough to build intimate friendships. Or maybe I just haven’t spent enough time with the right people to develop those friendships. But I can address a long time, long distance friendship and how we maintained it. My best friend and I went back thirty years. When she moved to Las Vegas, I was afraid our friendship would unravel as long distance friendships do.
But she nurtured ours with phone calls, emails, quirky gifts, bizarre voice mails, and even a contest to see who could give the ugliest gift. She conceded when I sent her a purse made from a Mexican bullfrog that had been gutted and dried. He had a zipper in his abdomen and shoulder straps attached to his front and back legs. She actually used that purse when she went to her boss’s annual “Christmas tea.”
Her fear of flying kept her from visiting me, but I flew to see her in LV and we shopped the hotel boutiques, lunched on lavender shortbread cookies, watched big horn sheep climb mountains above Lake Mead, and wore out the handles on a few slot machines. She always made sure I experienced something new on each trip.
When her cancer turned terminal, she didn’t tell me. Instead she sent a gift that wasn’t a Christmas or a birthday present, just an I love you and miss you gift. It was a beret of tiny pink flowers on a crocheted field of yellow. It is SO me. And I cherish it as a symbol of how well she knew that behind my tough exterior, there’s really a girly girl who’d love a hat like this. I miss her deeply. She knew all my secrets and loved me anyway.
My friends are on my Christmas list. After 75 years of sending greetings to neighbors I didn’t know very well or to business associates I felt obligated to include, I have pared down my Christmas list to lasting and enduring friends who live in other places. Friends who live nearby are different. We talk and see each other often. They don’t get a Christmas card. The Christmas list is also the Birthday list. I write a birthday verse each year for those people and include pictures and illustrations. They look forward to getting their cards and saving them. I save copies. They stay in touch with me via email so that I will know what’s going on in their lives and I will have “material” for the next verse. Sometimes the cards are funny, but sometimes they reflect a bump in the road of their life. Some day when I no longer remember my own name, I may take out those copies and get a glimmer of the June I spent at their lake house in Minnesota, or the year they got stranded by a Nebraska blizzard at our house and we all got the flu, of their family picture with all those kids! Friendship is shared experience and being able to preserve it…in the mind or on paper. Who’s on Your Christmas list?
My best friend lives right across from me in another building. She and I met online and posted, talked on the phone and sent each other things for about 10 yrs before we met in person. At that time, she was living in Missouri and I was living in Canada. She came to stay with me for seven months and we clicked immediately. Now we both live in Iowa, as I said, in buildings across from each other. We spend a lot of time together. She has had problems with her family and they have rejected her, but my family adores her. She has become a second grandmother to my grandkids, another sister to my sister. We talk to each other when we are sad or happy or have exciting things going on in our lives. When I’m down, she cheers me up and I try to do the same for her. We both use power wheelchairs and often take off with the chairs, toodling, we call it, to go out for lunch or just to get some fresh air. We are each other’s support system, psychiatrist, and family. There is nothing we wouldn’t do for each other. We have each other’s backs.